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Les was raised in Dayton by his mother and stepfather (who he thought was his biological father). He has been employed by WKRP since 1954, beginning as an office boy and cub reporter. In the episode "Secrets of Dayton Heights", he fails a security check for a press conference because his biological father had belonged to the Communist party. He is shocked, inasmuch as he himself is virulently anti-Communist, an attitude instilled in him by his embittered mother (also played by Sanders). He goes to visit Harvey Moorehouse, his biological father, working as a barber, and finds that he isn't such a bad guy, and that Moorehouse likely gave up his son to spare him the shame of his Communist activities.[1] Les decides to continue to go to Moorehouse's barber shop in an effort to get to know his father, but does not choose to reveal to him that he is Moorehouse's son.

The slight, balding, bespectacled man always wears a bow tie (though he wore a standard necktie in the pilot episode) and always has a bandage somewhere on his person, a running gag that began with the actor's first appearance (when he actually needed it due to a backstage injury).[1] Lines explaining the injury were written and then cut, and thereafter Les simply appeared each week with a new bandage and new unexplained injury.[2] The producers explained that the gag was overlooked by audience members, who didn't remember that Les has a large dog named Phil at his home, and Les often lives in fear of being attacked, or bitten, thus requiring the use of the band-aids.[1]

Les is the ludicrously incompetent news director of WKRP and has been with the station since 1954. Knowing very little about sports (or, for that matter, general news itself), he makes several glaring errors, for example mispronouncing golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez' name as "Chy Chy Rod-ri-gweeze", (even mispronouncing it a second time after Johnny corrects him)[2] referring to chihuahuas as "chee-hooah-hooahs", and calling a women's swimming event "breast stroking."

Les is a five-time winner of the fictitious Ohio radio news trophy, the "Buckeye Newshawk Award," the coveted "Silver Sow Award" (for excellence in farm news, particularly hog reports), and the "Copper Cob Award" (also for farm broadcasting). Sanders explained that the Silver Sow award was invented as a plot device to give Les a reason to ask Jennifer on a date. The award subsequently "tickled the fancy of hog producers across the country."[3]

The episode "Les on a Ledge" is centered around a distraught Les standing outside one of the station's windows in an apparent suicide attempt after he is accused of being homosexual and therefore banned from the Bengals' locker room. The rest of the characters try to figure the situation out and talk him off the ledge, with the unidentified player who made the original comment eventually calling the station and apologizing.

Les is prominently featured in WKRP's most famous episode, "Turkeys Away", where he reports on what becomes a disastrous station promotion, evoking Herbert Morrison's emotional description of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. This scene[4] is widely acknowledged to be one of the funniest moments in television history.[2][5]

Les longs to "move up" to a higher-paying job as a TV newsman, and in one episode he shows a video tape to his station friends of himself reporting the news; unfortunately for Les, the tape is so cheaply and badly made, that Nessman runs out quite embarrassed. In another episode, Les shows Venus Flytrap how he has been dyeing his skin black — a parody of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. When Bailey Quarters is promoted as a reporter, Les is jealous enough to attempt to upstage her by plagiarizing an initial draft of one of her news stories, unaware that it is partially fictional and thus puts the station's broadcast license in jeopardy.[1]

Les works in the WKRP bullpen, a big room with desks for several of the employees. Les believes that as the news director, he should have his own private office, so he puts masking tape on the floor around his desk indicating where walls would be if he had his own office. He insists that anyone who approaches his desk must knock at an imaginary door and wait for permission to come in. He mimes opening and closing a door whenever he sits down at or leaves his desk; once he even took out a set of keys to lock the nonexistent door. All of his colleagues respect his insistence on maintaining his own private space, and play along with his "walls" charade. Mr. Carlson even "knocks" by clicking his heels together, although Jennifer was permitted to ignore the imaginary walls.[2]

Les's initial sexist resistance to Bailey working in the "man's world" of journalism, and his eventual acceptance of her as an equal was an important story-arc that has been repeatedly noted as a significant reflection of changing gender roles during this time.[6][7]

Les Nessman has made numerous "real life" appearances around the country. During WKRP's run, these included appearances at many pork producer association events — Nessman having become the darling of the industry, where he received real life versions of the fictional "Silver Sow Award"[8] — and singing rock and roll music at nightclubs.[3] In 1985, Sanders guest-hosted the morning drive slot on Anchorage, Alaska's radio station KENI in character as Les Nessman, the first "real-life" appearance of Les since cancellation of WKRP. While Sanders simply flew into Anchorage to make the appearance, Les took the wrong bus, wound up in Texas, hitchhiked from there to North Dakota and then to Great Slave Lake, rode with a bush pilot to Whitehorse, bought a motorscooter, was sighted near Tok, was arrested for a minor traffic infraction, and then was bailed out of jail by the station.[9] Subsequent appearances by Sanders as Les included the 1997 Lexington, Kentucky Christmas parade, during which he simulated a re-enactment of the famous "Turkeys Away" episode.[10]

Another rap-reference nod to Les Nessman is by the rap group Atmosphere from Minnesota on the song "Millennium Dodo":

Got a room at the Best Western
The guy at the front desk looks like Les Nessman

In an episode of The CW series Reaper he was a fictitious employee the character 'Sock', made up in order to double his wages and receive other benefits, although WKRP in Cincinnati itself was unmentioned in the episode.